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VI. Heraclitus and the Metaphysical Tradition (1967) <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next>> What did he mean by fire? Fire was a symbol for him; the symbol of process. Something is going on, something is changing, which is especially visible in fire. The "essence" of this change is what he was after. He paints a world that is in constant, permanent change. A world which is eternally torn apart by strife, and in which the "unity of opposites" that are created, are once more torn apart; a very wild cosmos indeed. (And it is through the apprehension of the logos that one comes to understand the "essence" of this change)* [* We have paraphrased this and included it at this point since we felt it necessary as a point of clarification.], for his main principle is still the logos. It will be a long time until finally, in Christianity, there will appear the incarnation of the logos, which is supposed to be Christ. The logos of Heraclitus has nothing whatsoever to do with Christ. It isn't Jehovah either. He speaks only cold-bloodedly about what we would call today, the growing "God" consciousness of man. He is only concerned with the growing world consciousness of man. Here he follows Homer without knowing it, because for Homer the cosmos "was" God. The "gods" were only "in" the cosmos; the cosmos itself, and its laws, namely "moyra", fate, and necessity, were the real "God". Heraclitus, although he would have hated the idea, followed Homer in this respect, because his logos is a principle which is beyond the world, and yet which works into the world, This principle is, for us, a symbol of the irresistibility of the human intellect. If he says logos, I would say intellect, because he describes to us as logos only the intellect and nothing else. There is no other world but the "intellectual" world that can be conceived of by a man who applies no other laws and has no other concerns than the strict necessity of happenings. Here this ancient metaphysician really paves the way for science. For if the scientist cannot pause, nor be interested in anything but the how, "how" it happens, can neglect the what, and does not answer the why, then he can indeed proceed to "investigate" nature, and directly. Heraclitus established this. When he had said "Listen not to me, but to the logos," he meant to tell us that there is nothing in the world that happens accidentally. All things are necessary. The world can be understood completely if we understand its law. It is the first great idea of the possibilities of natural law, and every scientist must accept the metaphysical assumption that we come to know the world only by the logical organization of natural laws and human laws. Heraclitus paved the way for them, even though in the strict sense he is not a scientist himself since he neglects direct knowledge. He wants to make knowledge possible, and nothing but knowledge. He isn't talking about wisdom either, because that doesn't exist for him. He wants just one ironclad law of necessity, by which we can explain everything, and so the dream of science starts here. We can explain everything with the help of the logos; the logos, so to speak is his God. He said,
In other words, it does not matter what you call this principle. You can call it Zeus, or logos, "it" doesn't care. Of all the Greek gods, he recognizes only Zeus, and him he uses as a sort of pseudonym for logos. Pantheistically speaking, this can only mean that he really believes the world is full of "the spirit of intellect." Everything is ruled by the "absolute intellect", which we cannot achieve, but within which our own intellects infinitely expand. It can expand itself, it is self-increasing. Here he draws a sharp line. The unity of (All "as" One) which is given in the idea of the absolute logos that rules within the world but is outside of the world; who as Zeus, rules the world "as" a thunderbolt, sending lightning into the world, and creates mixtures out of the elements; this logos is both One and Many, therefore the world itself partakes "of" the logos to different degrees. The degrees are important. If we think of the logos which rules nature in the form of intellect, as "spirit", "geist", then that would mean that the world is spiritual through and through. Spirit works in everything, even in the lowest thing let alone in man, and it is absolute in God, or what he would call God. This is a dualistic world view which has been made monistic by putting matter and spirit together. He sees them as One, spirit working through matter and ruling matter (matter, the vessel of spirit, being infinitely shaped and molded by it). Where did we hear that? I heard it last in the nineteenth century when Hegel wrote his philosophy, and Hegel called his God, whom he wanted to view as a Hebrew and Christian God, the World Spirit. According to Hegel, the World Spirit works in the world and through the world; he learned all that from Heraclitus. Because the idea of the logos, as Heraclitus presents it to us is already the idea of the World Spirit and the World Spirit in permanent action. It might be that the Greeks in their inability to follow Heraclitus did not like a permanently disturbed cosmos. He was the only Greek who ever said in a very modern way that the cosmos is nothing but a round phenomenon of infinite action. It is a dynamic cosmos, a bundle of "energies" that from a strict logical continuity change into each other, closed and yet infinite. (11) But the universe is different from the cosmos. The universe is just a phenomenon, while the cosmos is a "well ordered" phenomenon, and if you have a well ordered cosmos, then you must give account of the order in it. That was the idea of Heraclitus, to give account of the order. Nothing happens accidentally; you only have to understand the one law from which everything is derived, and that is the law of the unity of opposites. The world is an eternal fire, ruled by movement, by dynamics, and the law of dynamics is that there shall never be an end to strife. "War makes kings, makes Gods" he says mockingly. Gods are made by wars? He is only too right. The unity of opposites is indicated in every phenomenon he observes, and it was this discovery of the unity "in" all things that he thought he could teach us. That unity is founded upon the logicality of every happening in the world; Spirit (logos) is in everything and therefore nothing can be accidental, nothing can be taken out of context, everything is in eternal flux. And in the final analysis, that means process. Ever since Hegel in the nineteenth century all of our scientists and philosophers have started to think in terms of process. It all originated with Heraclitus. We can envision a world of constant logical change, because he tells us that we "are" logos, and yet as logos we are different from the logos of other things; for of all phenomenon in the universe the intellect, or soul of man is the most difficult to comprehend. He says,
We will never understand the logos of the human soul, so deep is this logos, for it is infinite and permanently growing. And if we look at the development of the sciences, where every day something new is added and almost every four weeks a new science is made possible, then we must conclude that indeed, he was right, our knowledge of man is permanently growing. Unfortunately, the other parts of our mind are not growing as fast as science. The intellect has outrun us, and science has been triumphant, because of, or thanks to, Heraclitus. I have said the Greeks never followed him. His words were preserved for many centuries in the writings of other men, and then, in the seventeenth century, something very strange happened. If you read the whole system of Spinoza, it is nothing but the changed system of Heraclitus. Only in Spinoza's "Substance", Spirit and matter are united, where in Heraclitus they "act" through one another. In Spinoza's system "Natura naturans" means, according to the theologians, that he is an atheist. He means "Natura"; nature "is" God. He did not separate God from either nature or the world, and that made for the strange and strict logicality of his system. Nothing can be said against it, once you have accepted his initial assumptions. Even in Descartes, and then much later in Leibnitz, one sees the use of this method, and then suddenly in the nineteenth century, Heraclitus is resurrected and Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche all become fanatical Heracliteans. It is wondrous, almost mystical, how these few fragments could be neglected for so long and then become so modern. They all needed process thinking, Hegel especially needed process thinking, and who could be better to go back to in order to learn to think by process. Of course, they meant by process "evolution", which is quite another thing. Heraclitus would never have agreed to that, because he did not have any idea of "evolution", or even of a (spatially) infinite universe for that matter. They took his notion of process, and applied it in their own way, and they wanted to give this process a name, so they called it "evolution". That means that the whole process leads to something. In Heraclitus the whole process of the cosmos leads to absolutely nothing. Except more development of energy, more quarrel, more strife, and that seems to have been his greatest joy. Strangely enough, a non-scientific philosopher will draw the same conclusion, and that is Friedrich Nietzsche, for when he speaks about Dionysus who is the world, then he is a strict Heraclitean. To Heraclitus, the growing consciousness of the world, the growing world itself, is the only aim. There is no other aim that makes the whole thing finally, a bit grotesque. Doesn't it? <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next>> |
